Subject: Foundation of Special and Inclusive
Education
Section: 2
Time: 3 pm – 6 pm
Date: May 11, 2024
Instructor: Dr. Michelle Lauron
Group 8: Students who are Blind and with Hearing
Impairments
Members:
1. Juntilla, May
2. Mondero, Maria Nathalie D
3. Servidad, Leslie
4. Angel Rose T. Uy
LEARNERS WITH DIFFICULTY SEEING, HEARING,
AND COMMUNICATING
Inclusive education is essentially a program
that enables all learners with or without disability to
participate fully in the life and work of mainstream
settings to meet his or her learning needs.
LEARNERS WITH DIFFICULTY SEEING
● Visual acuity refers to the ability to distinguish
forms or discriminate among details.
● Legal blindness refers to having a visual acuity
of 20/200 or less in the better eye with the use of
a corrective lens.
● Partially sighted individuals are those whose
visual acuity in the better eye after correction
falls between 20/70 and 20/200.
● Tunnel vision is a condition of having a
perception of viewing the world through a narrow
tube. In this case, central vision may be good,
but peripheral vision is poor at the outer ranges
of the visual field.
Total blindness refers to receiving no useful
information through the sense of vision. In this
case, a learner uses tactile and auditory senses for all
learning; while functional blindness means having so
little vision that one learns primarily through the tactile
and auditory senses.
Characteristics of Learners with Difficulty Seeing
(Heward, 2017).
● Cognition and Language.
Learners with difficulty seeing usually
perform more poorly compared
those with normal vision in terms of
cognitive tasks that require
comprehension or relating various kinds
of information.
● Motor Development and Mobility.
Blindness may also result in delays and
deficits in motor development. Vision
is also important in telling the distance
of objects and direction
movement.
● Social Adjustment and Interaction.
Children with visual impairment may
engage in less play, which could
affect their social skills
development.
Those with visual impairment are prone to develop
stereotypic behavior, such as repetitive body
movements, including body rocking, eye pressing
and poking, hand flapping, and head weaving. While
they usually do not cause harm, these behaviors could
place a visually impaired person at a social
disadvantage as they may be misinterpreted and may
call negative attention to others.
Types and Causes of Visual Impairment
1. Amblyopia
- Reduction in or loss of vision in the
weaker eye from lack of use, caused by
strabismus, unequal refractive errors,
or capacity of the lens or cornea.
2. Astigmatism
- Distorted or blurred vision caused by
irregularities in the cornea or other
surfaces of the eye that produce
images on retina not in equal focus
3. Cortical Visual Impairment (CVI)
- Impaired vision caused by damage to or
malfunction of the visual cortex or optic
nerve (or both); causes include anoxia,
head injury, and infections of the central
nervous system.
4. Hyperopia (Farsightedness)
- Difficulty seeing near objects clearly but
able to focus on distant objects; caused
by a shorter than normal eye that
prevents light rays from converging on
the retina
5. Muscular (Degeneration)
- Central area of the retina gradually
deteriorates, causing loss of clear vision
in the center of the visual field; common
in older adults but fairly rare in children.
6. Myopia (Nearsightedness)
- Distant objects are blurred or not seen
at all but near objects are seen clearly;
caused by an elongated eye that
focuses images in front of the retina.
7. Nystagmus
- Rapid, involuntary, back-and-forth
movement of the eyes, which makes it
difficult to focus on objects.
8. Strabismus
- Inability to focus on the same object with
both eyes because of an inward or
outward deviation of one or both eyes;
caused by muscle imbalance;
secondary to other visual impairments
Identifying Learners with Difficulty Seeing
There are a number of indicators of visual
impairment that parents and teachers need to be
aware of.
● In terms of eye appearance, turning of
one eye in or out at any time; reddening
of eyes or lids; excessive tearing of eyes; having
encrusted eyelids; or frequently developing
styes (stye (sometimes spelled sty) is a painful
red bump on the edge of your eyelid) on lids
to could be signs of developing eye and visual
problems.
● There are also behavioral signs indicating visual
problems. Behavioral manifestations of this
include: turning of head as one reads across the
page; frequently losing place during reading;
needing the use of finger or marker just to keep
place when reading; having short attention span
in reading or copying; frequent omission of
of words, writing in uphill or downhill
direction on paper; rereading or skipping lines
without being aware of it; and poor page
orientation of drawings.
● Other behavioral indicators of visual impairment
include deficits in eye-hand coordination
abilities.
● Problems with refractive status (e.g.,
nearsightedness, farsightedness, and focus
problems) may also be inferred from
behavioral indicators of visual problems.
● The Snellen chart. The Snellen chart is used to
test visual acuity. It consists of rows of letters,
with each row corresponding to the distance
that a normally sighted person could
discriminate letters (Heward, 2017)
Learners with difficulty Hearing ● Meningitis - A bacterial or viral infection of the
The Decibel Scale central nervous system and is the leading cause
Deafness is defined as severe hearing loss in of postlingual hearing loss.
that the learner is impaired in processing linguistic ● Meniere's disease - Sudden and unpredictable
information through hearing, with or without attacks of vertigo, fluctuations in hearing, and
amplification, and which negatively affects a learner's tinnitus (perception of sound when no outside
educational performance. sound is present).
Hearing loss pertains to loss in hearing, ● Noise Exposure - Repeated exposure to loud
whether permanent or fluctuating, that negatively sounds
affects a learner's educational performance, other
than those that qualify as deafness. Identifying Learners with Difficulty Hearing
Residual hearing refers to some sounds ● Speech Problems. Some of the speech
perceived by most deaf people. Decibels (dB) refer to problems which can be due to hearing
the intensity or loudness of sound. Zero difficulty are inability to say words correctly,
hearing-threshold level is the smallest sound a person delays in language learning and
with normal hearing can perceive; also called the communication, and opting to use
audiometric zero. Hertz (Hz) pertain to the frequency, or non-verbal gestures over verbal
pitch, of sound (Heward, 2017). communication.
● Inattentiveness. When a child does not
Characteristics of Learners with Difficulty Hearing respond when being called, it could be a sign
● Literacy. Learners with hearing loss are at a of hearing difficulty.
great disadvantage in acquiring language skills. ● Increasing Volume. If a child puts the volume
Learners with difficulty hearing have on the television, radio, or computer too high, or
smaller vocabularies compared to those with if he or she speaks louder than most children,
normal hearing. these could also be indicative of hearing
● Speaking. Aside from having difficulty problems.
learning a language, they also could not hear ● Not Following Directions. Children with
their own speech, which makes it difficult to hearing difficulty also have difficulty with
assess and monitor it. language, and thus, may be confused by
● Academic Achievement. Students with directions, find it difficult to follow directions, or
difficulty hearing usually perform poorly consistently ask for instructions to be
than their peers with normal hearing. repeated.
● Social Functioning. Hearing loss may result in ● Learning Difficulties. Learners with hearing
feelings of isolation, having no friends, and problems find it more difficult than other children
unhappiness in school, as this limits to learn various aspects of verbal
socialization with peers. communication such as vocabulary, grammar,
word order, and idiomatic expressions.
Types and Causes of Hearing Loss ● Social Withdrawal. Individuals with hearing
● Conductive Hearing Impairment. It involves a problems tend to avoid social situations, and
problem with the conduction or transmission of thus, may not participate in activities such as
sound vibrations to the inner ear. sports, parties, or even family gatherings.
● Sensory Hearing Impairment. This refers to
the damage to the cochlea. Assessment of Hearing Loss
● Neural Hearing Impairment. This refers to the ● Pure Tone Audiometry. It is used to assess the
abnormality of the auditory nerve pathway. hearing of older children and adults by
● Mixed Hearing Impairment. This refers to any determining how loud sounds at various
combination of conductive, sensory, and neural frequencies must be for one to hear them.
hearing loss. ● Speech Reception Test. It tests a
● Unilateral Hearing Loss. This is hearing loss in person's detection and understanding of
one ear. speech sounds.
● Bilateral Hearing Loss. This is hearing loss in ● Alternative Audiometric Techniques. It
both ears. includes play audiometry, in which the child is
● Congenital Hearing Loss. This is hearing loss taught to perform simple but distinct activities
present at birth. whenever one hears the signal speech or pure
● Acquired Hearing Loss. This is hearing loss tone; operant conditioning audiometry, in which
that develops after birth. the child receives tokens when a button is
● Prelingual Hearing Loss. This is hearing loss pushed in the presence of a light paired with the
before the development of spoken language. sound; and behavior observation
● Postlingual Hearing Loss. This hearing loss audiometry, which is a passive assessment
happened after the development of spoken procedure in which the child's reactions to
language. sounds is observed.
CONGENITAL
● Genetic Factors - eg., Autosomaldominant
hearing loss, when one parent passes on à
dominant gene for hearing loss to a child;
autosomal recessive hearing loss, when Prepared by:
both parents have recessive genes for
hearing loss; X-linked hearing loss, when ANGEL ROSE UY
the mother carries the recessive trait for
hearing loss on the sex chromosome and
passes it to a male offspring but not to females LESLIE SERVIDAD
● Maternal Rubella - When a pregnant
woman contracted rubella, which could
cause deafness in the developing child. MAY JUNTILLA
● Congenital Cytomegalovirus - When a
woman contracts cytomegalovirus, which risks
deafness in the developing child. MARIA NATHALIE MONDERO
● Prematurity
ACQUIRED
● Otitis media - A temporary, recurrent infection
of the middle ear.